Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

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Chambers Backs Off Landslide Predictions

After weeks of claiming that all the polls were wrong and that Romney was really leading the election by landslide margins, Dennis Chambers of Unskewed Polls has backed way off in his final predictions. A week ago he was predicting Romney would get over 300 electoral votes and win nearly all the swing states. Now he says it will be 275 for Romney, banking on Ohio to put him over the top.
So what did he change? A week ago he had Romney winning Iowa, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Hampshire. Now he has those going to Obama, with Colorado, Virginia, Florida and Ohio going to Romney. And he seems to think that nearly every race that is within the margin of error will go to Romney, based on such compelling arguments as “he’s connecting with the people there.”

Colorado is in a category by itself. The RCP average shows Obama leading 48.8 percent to Romney at 47.3 percent. Mitt Romney has campaigned extensively in this race recently, has had some great rallies and connected well with the voters. The last Rasmussen survey of the state, based on a very balanced and fair sample, shows Romney winning the state 50 percent to 47 percent. Other than a skewed Public Policy Polling survey, the rest of the polls show Romney tied or leading or trailing by a margin that is within the margin of error. The vote will be within one or two percent with Romney winning Colorado. That puts the count at Obama 263 to Romney 257 with only Ohio left to decide the election.

The race is Ohio is like the national race, it is a story of many believing skewed polls that show President Obama performing stronger than he really is while Romney is likely to surprise them in winning it. Many of the polls for Ohio are skewed and so too is the RCP average because of that. The most recent poll for Ohio is the Ohio Poll/Univ. of Cincinnati survey that shows Obama leading 50 percent to 49 percent with a 3.3 percent margin of error. The latest Rasmussen poll of Ohio has the race in the state tied at 49 percent.

Looks like he’s hedging his bets and cutting way back on his absurd predictions so he doesn’t look quite so bad.

I’m not sure why this clown thinks that the polls are skewed except for a couple of outliers (republican leaning). If he is basing it on incorrect turnout there would have to be a monumental difference.

I believe that Michael Heath has pointed out the duplicity of Rasmussen in that they modify their sampling approach just prior to the election to bring their prediction into agreement with the other polls. They then lie that they were right all along and that their sudden agreement with other polls was due to a last minute shift in voter preferences, not to their sampling strategy change.

The last Rasmussen survey of the state, based on a very balanced and fair sample, shows Romney winning the state 50 percent to 47 percent. Other than a skewed Public Policy Polling survey, the rest of the polls show Romney tied or leading or trailing by a margin that is within the margin of error. The vote will be within one or two percent with Romney winning Colorado.

So there was one poll, “Public Policy Polling Survey” that showed Romney trailing by more than the margin of error. All other polls show Romney tied, leading, or trailing by less than the margin of error (including the Rasmussen poll which gave a 4% margin). So the “unskewed” thing to do, apparently, is throw out the one poll favouring Obama, ignore that the Romney’s lead in the Rasmussen poll falls within its margin of error, and call the state for Romney anyway.

My concern in this election is directed at states where Obama is either tied or leads by less than 2%. I wonder how much success Republicans will enjoy when it comes to:
1) Non-partisan voters switching from Obama in the polls to Romney in the voting booth because Obama’s a black Democrat.
2) Voter suppression and other methods to deny people their right to vote or have their vote correctly counted.

I’m concerned because I haven’t encountered any poll results which adjust for these two factors where I’m not aware of any Democratic-friendly actions that would cancel the above two effects.

Well, I had a tiny effect upon the Colorado vote.
My daughter lives there. I talked to her, and got her to register and vote for the first time.
She shared information with her fiancee, who was unhappy with both of the candidates and planned to vote third party.
After he realized just how bad a Romney presidency would be for women and the LGBT community (they have several friends and co-workers from that community), he voted for Obama, too.
They have both been posting anti-Romney posts on their FB pages, too.